His father, Raúl, was a civil servant, an educated man of Spanish extraction, a librarian, and an amateur astronomer and musician.

Serious doubt has been cast on some of Villa-Lobos's tales of the decade or so he spent on these expeditions, and about his capture and near escape from cannibals, with some believing them to be fabrications or wildly embellished romanticism.

[4] After this period, he gave up any idea of conventional training and instead absorbed the musical influences of Brazil's indigenous cultures, themselves based on Portuguese and African, as well as American Indian elements.

Villa-Lobos played with many local Brazilian street-music bands; he was also influenced by the cinema and Ernesto Nazareth's improvised tangos and polkas.

In 1918, he also met the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who became a lifelong friend and champion; this meeting prompted Villa-Lobos to write more piano music.

In February 1922, a festival of modern art took place in São Paulo and Villa-Lobos contributed performances of his own works.

The press were unsympathetic and the audience were not appreciative; their mockery was encouraged by Villa-Lobos's being forced by a foot infection to wear one carpet slipper.

There had recently been an attempted military coup on Copacabana Beach, and places of entertainment had been closed for days; the public possibly wanted something less intellectually demanding, and the piece was booed.

He stayed in Paris in 1923–24 and 1927–30, and there he met influential residents including Edgard Varèse, Pablo Picasso, Leopold Stokowski and Aaron Copland.

[b] In the 1920s, Villa-Lobos also met the Spanish classical guitarist Andrés Segovia, who commissioned a guitar study: the composer responded by writing a set of twelve such pieces, each based on a tiny detail or figure played by Brazilian itinerant street musicians (chorões), transformed into an étude that is not merely didactic.

In 1936, at the age of forty-nine, Villa-Lobos left his wife, and became romantically involved with Arminda Neves d'Almeida, who remained his companion until death.

Villa-Lobos's writings during the presidency of Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945) include propaganda for Brazilian nationhood (brasilidade),[14] and teaching and theoretical works.

[15] After 1937, during the Estado Novo period when Vargas seized power by decree, Villa-Lobos continued producing patriotic works directly accessible to mass audiences.

The 1943 celebrations did include Villa-Lobos's hymn Invocação em defesa da pátria shortly after Brazil's declaring war on Germany and its allies.

[16] Villa-Lobos's status damaged his reputation among certain schools of musicians, among them disciples of new European trends such as serialism‍—‌which was effectively off limits in Brazil until the 1960s.

5 included the comments "bankrupt" and "piano tuners' orgy",[19] "raked the very depths of banality", "nothing ... but soupy textures or a bedraggled romantic idea", and "truly the kind of music that should never get written, still less performed".

[20] His music for the film Green Mansions starring Audrey Hepburn and Anthony Perkins, commissioned by MGM in 1958, earned Villa-Lobos US$25,000, and he conducted the soundtrack recording himself.

[23] From the score, Villa-Lobos compiled a work for soprano soloist, male chorus, and orchestra, which he titled Forest of the Amazon and recorded it in 1959 in stereo with Brazilian soprano Bidu Sayão, an unidentified male chorus, and the Symphony of the Air for United Artists Records.

[25] In November he died in Rio; his state funeral was the final major civic event in that city before the capital transferred to Brasília.

His attachment to the Iberian Peninsula is demonstrated in Canção Ibéria of 1914 and in orchestral transcriptions of some of Enrique Granados' piano Goyescas (1918, now lost).

1 (1915), a violin sonata including "histrionic and violently contrasting emotions",[27] the birds of L'oiseau blessé d'une flèche (1913), the mother–child relationship (not usually a happy one in Villa-Lobos's music) in Les mères of 1914, and the flowers of Suíte floral for piano of 1916–18 which reappeared in Distribuição de flores for flute and classical guitar of 1937.

[9] The latter piece includes the tempi and expression markings "vertiginoso e frenético", "infernal" and "mais vivo ainda" (faster still).

Carnaval das crianças of 1919–20 saw Villa-Lobos's mature style emerge; unconstrained by the use of traditional formulae or any requirement for dramatic tension, the piece at times imitates a mouth organ, children's dances, a harlequinade, and ends with an impression of the carnival parade.

Early works showing this influence were incorporated into the Suite populaire brésilienne of 1908–12 assembled by his publisher, and more mature works include the Sexteto místico (c.1955, replacing a lost and probably unfinished one begun in 1917),[33] and his setting of the poetry of Mário de Andrade and Catulo da Paxão Cearense in the Canções típicas brasileiras of 1919.

Subtitled Impressão rápida do todo o Brasil (A Brief Impression of the Whole of Brazil), the title of the work denotes it as ostensibly chamber music, but it is scored for flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet, saxophone, bassoon, celesta, harp, piano, a large percussion battery requiring at least two players, and a mixed chorus.

The extended Rudepoêma for piano, written for Rubinstein, is a multi-layered work, often requiring notation on several staves, and is both experimental and demanding.

[40] Villa-Lobos eventually recorded all nine of these works for EMI in Paris, mostly with the musicians of the French National Orchestra; these were originally issued on LPs and later reissued on CDs.

After the fall of the Vargas government, Villa-Lobos returned full-time to composition, resuming a prolific rate of completing works.

This technique also occurs in his final opera, Yerma, which contains a series of scenes each of which establishes an atmosphere, similarly to the earlier Momoprecoce.

[25] His Bendita Sabedoria, a sequence of a cappella chorales written in 1958, is a similarly simple setting of Latin biblical texts.